Events & News
Tasneem Kaochar Wins at Student Showcase
November 26, 2007
Tasneem Kaochar, a junior majoring in Computer Science, won two prestigious awards at the 15th Annual Student Showcase for her research on Identifying Unreachable Code for Compaction of the Linux Kernel. She won the First Place award in the Physical Sciences, Mathematics, Computer Engineering, and Computer Science category, as well as the President's Award for undergraduate research. The President's Award recognizes the undergraduate student project that best exemplifies scholarly creativity and academic excellence. The event, organized annually by the UA Graduate and Professional Student Council and held November 2-3, showcased the work of more than 80 UA student researchers from a wide variety disciplines ranging from Agriculture and Environmental Science to Visual and Performing Arts.
Tasneem's research focuses on a problem in computer software research known as alias analysis, which is concerned with figuring out which memory addresses may be accessed by a program at different points of its execution. This problem turns out to be undecidable (it is mathematically impossible to devise an algorithm that always computes a precise solution), so research has focused on ways to compute approximate solutions. Tasneem's earlier work, presented at the Student Showcase, aimed to use the results of alias analysis to identify unnecessary code in the Linux operating system kernel, with the goal of eliminating such code and reducing the memory requirements of the kernel. More recently, Tasneem has been investigating other approaches to alias analysis that can be used for the analysis of computer viruses.
A native of Bangladesh, Tasneem grew up in Tucson, graduating from Catalina Foothills High School in 2005. She joined the SOLAR research group the summer after her freshman year. As a result of her research involvement and desire to continue with her work, Tasneem was selected as one of the Undergraduate Scholars in Integrated Science from the UA College of Science. She also received the Undergraduate Research Grant from the Honors College to fund her research work last summer. In addition to research, Tasneem loves learning new languages. She is currently studying Spanish and Arabic.